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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 7, No. 37 |
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Mystery's Grand Master
brings back Sid Halley
of TheColumnists.com
When Dick Francis announced his retirement from writing in 2001, I predicted in these very pages that he'd be back. Happily, I was right. The Grand Master of the equestrian mystery has returned with "Under Orders" (Putnam, $25.95), a brand new mystery featuring my favorite Francis hero, ex-steeplechase jockey Sid Halley.
The good news is that Francis, who's now in his mid-80s, still turns out a crackling good mystery yarn with all his best assets intact--a strong leading character, a rich and complex yet credible plot and lots of well-researched detail about the subject matter at hand, in this case internet gaming, DNA research and, of course, horse racing.
Sid Halley first made his debut in "Odds Against," the fourth mystery novel by Francis, who retired as one of England's finest steeplechase jockeys--he carried the colors of the Queen Mother--after suffering too many troubling injuries. Like Francis, Sid Halley is a retired steeplechase jockey whose career was ended by injury.
In Sid's case, it was a spectacular injury, though. His horse stumbled in a novice race and he would have escaped injury except for the following horse, which stepped on the palm of Sid's left hand with its razor-sharp hoof and nearly severed the hand. Crippled with a deformed and withered hand, Sid finally replaced it with a bionic hand that almost could do what a real hand could do.
Working as a private investigator with a specialty in racing cases, Sid reappeared in "Whip Hand," then, after a long absence, in "Come To Grief." "Under Orders" is the fourth in the Halley series. Sid is the only Francis character to appear in that many different novels--and he was the central character of "The Racing Game," the TV series that appeared on TV in the early days of PBS' "Mystery!" series.
This time out, Sid is checking into several mysteries that turn out to be tangled up with each other. First, he's trying to find out who pumped bullets into jockey Huw Walker just a few hours after Walker won a major race. Then Lord Enstone has him looking into why his string of horses has been on such a losing streak. Finally, Sid is determined to prove that a jockey friend of his didn't commit suicide because he'd been named as a suspect in the Walker murder.
Sid soon realizes he's ticked off some very powerful interests in the racing world by getting too close to the truth. He not only has to worry about what might happen to him, but then he learns the bad guys are going after Sid's girl friend, Marina van der Meer, a Dutch beauty who works for a major UK chemical lab, and trying to hurt her bad enough to make Sid lay off his investigations.
There's plenty of excitement and lots of absorbing plot turns to keep Francis fans, long starved for something new, reading long after their normal "lights out" time.
I'd assumed that Francis called it a day in 2001 because his wife had died the previous year. She was his chief editor and his helpmate for all his mysteries, so I figured it would be very difficult for him to start a new book without her there to help him. But it's been five years since his last novel, "Shattered," and one can only hope that he missed the thrill of creating his popular books enough to go it alone--or perhaps with some new helper.
There's no feeling of finality about "Under Orders," so I'm hoping Francis has decided to resume his career and will do so until he no longer has the energy to come up with new mysteries. Nobody has come up to take his place since he stopped writing, so he's automatically right back at the top of the short list of equestrian mystery writers.
Of course, Dick Francis long ago transcended the category of horse mysteries because of his extremely wide readership. He's now a recognized master of mystery and having him back is like finding out that Conan Doyle finally has returned from the spirit world and is ready to write new Sherlock Holmes adventures for us all.
©2006 by Ron Miller.
This column first posted Oct. 30, 2006.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
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